


Abel Gives his Brother Solace

by Relvetica



Category: Xenogears
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-15
Updated: 2013-05-15
Packaged: 2017-12-11 23:06:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,632
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/804282
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Relvetica/pseuds/Relvetica
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In one hand Abel held a pitcher of water, and in the other he clutched what looked like a handful of rock salt. "Is this your gift?" Cain asked.</p><p>"Yes." Abel turned from him to face the mountain. "Follow me," he said, and began to make his way up the path.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Abel Gives his Brother Solace

**Author's Note:**

When Abel left the settlement, as it were, he tended to do so for months at a time. More than a year, once. He said he trusted Cain to oversee things without him, and Cain supposed that must be true, but it made clear the fact that Abel did not consider himself one of them. In his heart, he wanted to keep moving. It felt more like dismissal than trust, and Cain didn't like it. But Cain had other things to concern himself with in the beginning.

It was shading into early autumn when Abel appeared before them again, and as soon as Cain heard word he lurched from his bench and threw off his headdress, and he ran barefoot out into the sun to meet him. Abel was gazing up at the mountain their settlement lay at the base of, but he turned when Cain approached. Cain slid to a stop beside him, grinning and spreading his bare arms, and said, "Do you see?"

Abel tilted his head curiously. For a bad moment Cain feared that Abel would dare insult him with puzzlement, but he said, "You've grown."

"Yes."

"Have the others?"

Cain nodded. "This land has accepted us. The Mother won't be in want, and our children will inherit her bounty. There is no longer any doubt."

"I see." Abel nodded and smiled. "I'm glad. You suit your station now."

"My station now suits _me."_ It was cocky, perhaps, but he was the only one who would dare address Abel in such a way to his face. "I will be as you said."

"Mm." Abel smirked a little. "You are not entirely grown."

"That's only the fault of your timing. I will grow as large as a tree."

Abel was meant to laugh at that like the child he was, but he only considered him with that sly smile. "No," he finally said. "You are not yet complete."

"I'm not...?" Cain lowered his arms. "What do you mean, not complete?"

"It's no fault of your own," Abel said. "I just forgot to give you something."

Cain snorted and kicked dust. "I don't need any of your gifts. We are not of you."

"I know." Abel smiled again. "But you'll like this one. And without it... I, too, am incomplete."

Cain blinked.

"I can't believe I forgot!" Abel laughed. He dusted his hands off on his thighs and said, "Meet me here tomorrow."

Cain returned to the same spot at dawn, again bareheaded. The sight of his face was an honor he bestowed on few. When Abel deigned to join him, Cain was startled to see that the difference in their height had closed overnight; when Abel smiled at him now, it was at eye level. He stretched out his arms and said, "Yes, that's about right."

Cain could not hide his irritation, but he was hardly surprised. In one hand Abel held a pitcher of water, and in the other he clutched what looked like a handful of rock salt. "Is this your gift?" he asked.

"Yes." Abel turned from him to face the mountain. "Follow me," he said, and began to make his way up the path.

Cain hesitated. They came down from the mountain many years ago on small feet unsure of their steps on the rocky terrain, but no one had dared return to it. Abel, however, went anywhere he pleased. Cain hissed another irritated sigh and made his way after him.

It took them the better part of the day to reach the crash site. Cain tried not to look, but in the end he could not help it, and he gazed up at the body the Mother had discarded to be reborn with her children. He was struck still with the shock that the body was rotting; her supple limbs were now no more than bones with drying skin stretched taut along their lengths, and her hair hung limply from an increasingly bare skull. Were they not supposed to be eternal? Even this poor discarded husk, which they had meant to leave here as a monument to the Mother's beauty?

"Here!" Abel called, and Cain swallowed thickly and hurried to join him.

Abel was kicking aside sheets of metal in the shade of the wreckage, revealing rocky sand underneath. "This will do," he said. He set down the pitcher and knelt in the dirt, and with his free hand he began to dig a long shallow trench in the crumbling soil. Cain knelt beside him. He had seen Abel perform this trick before with desert sand and with river mud, but the accessories were new.

"What are you making?" he asked.

"You'll see," Abel said, not looking up. When he was satisfied, he opened his hand over the trench and sprinkled the salt into the tight space he'd created, and then poured about half of the pitcher's contents in after it, creating a thick, pale mud. He rubbed his hands together briskly and then thrust them in, as though the mud were potter's clay.

Cain watched in silence as Abel made the mass long and smooth, and then pressed in details with his fingers. It started off rounded and thick, and then tapered in the middle to immediately thicken again, before tapering down for good into another rounded end, smaller than the first. Abel sat back to admire his work, biting his lip in concentration. He nodded. "Move back," he said. "Behind me."

Cain did so, not understanding Abel's revelation to him but too proud to repeat his question. Abel dug his fingers back into the mud, wrapping them around the smaller end of his creation, and gently tugged upward on it. Cain had seen this enough times to know the clay would not break, but he was surprised to see what he first took for long slender roots resisting Abel's pull. But as they were tugged free of their muddy cradle, he saw that they were fingers; Abel was delicately loosening an arm from the earth.

It flexed easily at the elbow and the shoulder, and once it was free Abel draped it over his shoulders and pulled. Beyond the sand he had wet with the water, the soil was dry and gave easily as a man's torso and head were lifted from it. Abel adjusted his grip so the man leaned back against him, and then he pulled at the body from another angle, freeing its legs from where Cain had just been sitting. In the end he cradled the body of a grown man, more fully formed than either Abel or Cain, crusted in sand and unmoving.

Abel looked up at Cain and smiled. Cain swallowed. "Is he... alive?"

"No more," said Abel, "and not yet. Hand me the water."

Cain passed the pitcher back to Abel, who used what was left of its contents to pour over the man's head, washing away the mud and the sand. It revealed a face that made Cain's heart shudder in the turn of a beat; Abel grasped the man's chin and examined him with scrutiny. "Close enough," he finally said.

"Who is he?" Cain whispered.

"He's my brother," Abel said, and Cain looked up at him sharply.

"I thought I was your brother," he said.

Abel nodded. "You are my younger brother. But I need an older brother as well. They're different things."

Cain sat back in the dirt. "You never said you could create people from the earth."

Abel said, "I can."

"Then..." Cain waved an arm towards the direction from which they'd come, the settlement. "What is the point of all this? What is the point of _us?_ If you can simply go out and populate the world by yourself--!"

"No," Abel said. "Don't misunderstand. This one," he said, indicating the prone figure in his arms, "comes from me. And that which comes from me cannot inherit this world, because I'm not of it. That is for you and for the others."

Somewhat mollified, Cain looked back down at the man in Abel's arms. Abel smiled down at him tenderly, and brushed away the sand that still cluing to the edges of his lips with his thumb. He leaned his head back for a moment, seemingly tracing the wreckage of their ark with his eyes, and then bent down and kissed his creation. Cain's eyes widened. It was a long, lingering embrace, with Abel's hand still cradling the man's cheek and jaw, and it seemed a very long time before his breath was exhausted and he lifted his head again.

The man stirred. Slowly at first: his fingers twitched, and then his shoulders shifted in Abel's grasp, and his eyes opened. He stared at Abel for a long moment, and then tried to lean up again to follow the lips that had just released his."No," Abel whispered. "On your own. Breathe."

He showed no sign of comprehension, but after a moment his lips parted and he took in a single shuddering breath. His chest rose with it, and then fell again as he released it, and then rose again. "Good," Abel said, "That's good." But Cain no longer listened; he watched the man's chest, and his eyes slid down to his belly and to his legs. He was an eerily perfect creature, nothing like Cain's brothers, his actual brothers.

"Beloved Cain," Abel said, and Cain's gaze jerked back up to Abel's sly smile, "You have grown so much this year. I'm very pleased."

Cain swallowed dryly. Abel shifted, letting the bulk of the man's weight slide down into his arms.

"Do you want him?" he asked.

Cain wanted to answer profoundly, as would befit his dignity were it anyone else before him. But he could think nothing, nothing, aside from, "Yes."

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Gilead](https://archiveofourown.org/works/813101) by [ladysisyphus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladysisyphus/pseuds/ladysisyphus)




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